The Necessarily Unadorned: On Frank Bidart's "Against Silence"
Frank Bidart | Against Silence | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 2021 | 60 Pages
Explicit vulnerability in the face of great evil renders the vulnerable both a target and a champion of resilience against oppression. There is, then, also a necessary obfuscation that comes when that oppressive evil appears to be winning. Code-switching, passing, staying in the closet, fleeing across borders—there are many ways to hide and be hidden from those forces which seek to annihilate what is different. When what is different is threatened, it is that much more important for the different to be celebrated, championed, defended. What can stand against the annihilation of identity is an identity that refuses annihilation, that records its existence in this world through creation. If annihilation is silence, then identity is the song sung against that silence.
Frank Bidart’s Against Silence enters at the intersection of difference and desire. His eleventh collection of poetry, Against Silence continues Bidart’s long-held exploration of love and intimacy, and champions the different, the peculiar, the unconventional. It is a direct and unflinching investigation into the mess of desire for any body that knows “what cannot be / possessed generates // lust.” Significantly, however, this is a queer text, a gay poet’s rendering of the failings and triumphs of love. The snarls of want: “The person you desire to touch but / who does not desire you // Who does not want to investigate your body // did not choose what he desires / just as you did not choose what you desire.” Monumental defeats exposed in the everyday: “You said to me matter-of-factly // I want you to move out of my apartment— // though (you say smiling) you must / continue paying the rent.” The writhing between rejection and fulfillment, conveyed through his signature involuted syntax: “When you / want me, I don’t think this is true. When you don’t, I do.”
In previous works, Bidart has not shied away from explicit queerness. Metaphysical Dog (2013) includes the poem “Queer,” which addresses the problematic “coming out” narrative:
For each gay kid whose adolescence
was America in the forties or fifties
the primary, the crucial
scenario
forever is coming out—
or not. Or not. Or not. Or not. Or not.
*
Involuted velleities of self-erasure.
Which seems to speak to what Thom Gunn meant when he wrote that gay writers “until at least the 1960s dealt with autobiographical and personal material only indirectly.” The necessary obfuscation. And “Across Infinities Without Sentience,” from Bidart’s Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning Half-light (2017), recounts the loss of the comfort of phone conversations with a recently deceased figure, represented only by “he,” and ends “we are queers of the universe.” (We are, Mr. Bidart.) Against Silence, therefore, carries on with Bidart’s bold openness and self-interrogation in the confessional style as the poet grapples with his own history in dramatic monologues, long-form poems, and briefer, lyrical contortions of language.
Despite the book’s formal bravura and the bravado of its multifaceted speaker(s), there is still that trepidation which in a vulnerable or threatened body condenses into overcaution, a hyper-awareness of the timid self alone against the storm, such as in this moment from “Words Reek Worlds,”
As I swagger out, armed (as I think) with
the secret of representation, as I swagger out among the tribes
I become aware that I am armed with a pebble against the ocean,
though
I speak I am silent.
This is, of course, testament to the hesitation for such vulnerability, the tendency towards a reclusive or even a complicit silence, the difficulties still faced even after being “out” in the public eye which any queer person might agree is the constant, daily struggle. It is clear the poet is examining his own failings, perhaps not just as a writer but as a person off the written page, as well as examining “silence” itself. How does silence aid the evils of oppression when oppression is winning, or even when it appears to be losing? And most importantly, how do we stand against such silence?
Bidart’s ideas on silence appear right away in the book’s first poem, “Why the Dead Cannot Answer.”
. . . when you ask what it is like
suddenly for what was always there
not to be there
for what had to be endured by those before you
to have to be endured now by you
LIKE, what in the world are such pervasive
vanishings LIKE,—
. . . no words it knows apply, and it is silent.
Silent. This is “the eternal silence of the dead.”
The silence of the dead, then, is not an incapacity to answer, but the incapacity of language to describe. How does one describe, say, generations of gay elders lost to AIDS? How does one describe the climbing number of brutal murders against trans women? How does one describe “what had to be endured by those before” when those before now are ghosts? When the ghosts outnumber the living, what more is there to say than that? “The terrible law of desire is what quickens desire is what is DIFFERENT,” Bidart writes in “The Fifth Hour of the Night,” the long poem which ends the first part of the book. Queerness as the difference, queerness as what “quickens.” That is, queer people often know they’re queer well before cis-het people know they’re not. Our contemporary cultural milieu is saturated by cis-hetoronormativity, and so most cis-het people have no need to question, to consider, to challenge their own identity. Queer people do, as they cast about for something in which to see themselves. From there comes early the instinct to hear the loudness of one’s being against the silence of others and, in hearing, to hide.
Much of Bidart’s previous work utilizes the persona poem to great effect, a form one might argue a poet “hides” behind. The persona poem, too, is a kind of silence, a level of removal between the poem and the poet-as-speaker of the confessional tradition; it is not the poet’s voice, but an imagined or assumed one. The persona, then, is a silence against which this book struggles as well, as it includes few true persona poems and is very much of Bidart’s own reflection. And it is not only queerness Bidart reflects on, but his family’s history of complicity in an entirely other form of oppression that is still all too American: racism. Several poems in the book discuss race, America’s history of enslavement, and Bidart’s own family. In these the poet comes down hardest with his own self-critique, connecting the personal with the larger political schema of a country built on racial violence. “The Fifth Hour of the Night” recounts a time from his childhood when his grandmother forbade him from eating at a Black friend’s house. “The rage I felt at what she demanded did not,” he writes, “preclude / my furious but supine eventual acquiescence.” He acknowledges he was a “coward” complicit in this encounter. Of course, what eight-year-old child knows how to stand up to an angry authority figure? Bidart, however, extends the lesson into adulthood in his reflection, grounded in the present. “I never forgave her for showing // me / me.” The encounter reveals himself to himself, a kind of revelation that stays with a person all their life. In this way, he begins to dissect his own history, and raises a mirror up to (white) readers: Look, see, this might be you, too. Acknowledge the coward within, and fight against its silent complicity.
As well as desire and race, Bidart reflects on America itself. America, he argues, fails to live up to the imaginary ideal the nation proclaims about itself. “Every serious work of art about America has the same / theme: America // is a great IDEA: the reality leaves something to be desired,” he writes in “Mourning What We Thought We Were.” Juxtaposing his own self-examination with a broader critique of American self-narration, the poem returns near its end to his commentary against the racist state in his typical sardonic irony: “Dark night, December 1st, 2016. // White supremacists, once again in / America, are acceptable, respectable. America!” Even as Bidart wrestles with his own complicity, he calls on America itself to join his cross-examination of the nation’s failings. This is not only his argument; this is an argument demanded of any who claim to stand against tyranny disguising itself as a “respectable” normality.
The people’s argument with America—which is America’s argument with America—seems alike to Yeats’ proposition of the “quarrel with ourselves,” which Bidart paraphrases, “Out of our argument with others we make / rhetoric, out of our argument with ourselves we make poetry.” In a conversation with Garth Greenwell (author of Cleanness, 2020) in late October of 2021, it was proposed that there is an art which moves us more than any revelation, and Bidart commented on these lines by Yeats and his paraphrase, saying Yeats’ “quarrel” seems too ambivalent, while “argument” carries the weight, the gravity of the necessary struggle. Perhaps in the argument with ourselves we make an art, a poetry of self-reckoning, and we are ourselves revealed to ourselves. It takes such explicit vulnerability within to more readily stand against the forces of oppression without.
Though the elements indicative of Bidart’s style in earlier works still remain in this book, Against Silence is all him, laid bare and vulnerable. In his words, “the unadorned quality [of the book] is an attempt to be as direct about the essential things as you must be when the world comes to you.” When the world comes to you, it does not do to sit in silence thinking the world will not also come for you. Bidart is a poet who demands much from a reader: attention, yes, but also trust. It is not until after he plunges his hands into the filth, dragging the reader with him, that you can begin to see he is digging through the murk to find the polished gem, that bit of humanity which even when clouded by sins—those we witness, those we commit—can still glimmer with an innate beauty. “Your place at my table / is saved / for you,” Bidart writes. Come, take your place, and indulge.